ABSTRACT
In seventeenth-century religious art, the real and the ideal were not necessarily at odds, and acute realism could coexist with imaginary figuration,1 especially in the most prominent representation of divinity, the history (istoria) often required of Italian painters. Aristotle’s celebrated distinction between the historian, who should describe what happened, and the poet, who should say what things might happen (Poetics IX.1451a36-8), reappears in Spenser when he opposes the historian, who “discourseth of affayres orderly as they were donne, accounting as well the times as the actions”, to the “poet historical”, who “thrusteth into the middest, even where it most concerneth him, and there recoursing to the things forepaste, and divining of things to come, maketh a pleasing analysis of all”.2
